David Hampton

David Hampton, who has died aged 39, was the confidence trickster whose life story formed the basis for John Guare's hit play Six Degrees of Separation (1990), which became a film in 1995.

Born at Buffalo, New York, in 1964, the eldest child of a lawyer, David Hampton arrived in New York City in 1981 set on pursuing an acting and dancing career. One night in 1983 he and a friend were trying to get into Studio 54. Turned away, they hit on the ruse of posing as the sons of Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck, went to the nearby Plaza hotel, borrowed a limo and returned to be ushered into the club as celebrities.

Hampton then took to entering restaurants and telling the manager he was there to meet his father, Sidney Poitier (who, in fact, had only daughters). After finishing all he wanted to eat, he would lament that his father must have been detained on business. The manager would then pick up the tab.

Aided by an address book belonging to an Upper East Sider whom he had briefly befriended, "David Poitier" suckered his way into the houses of some of Manhattan's glitziest socialites, including Melanie Griffith and Calvin Klein, claiming that he had been mugged and needed somewhere to stay for the night. He accepted money and clothes, regaled his hosts with stories about his famous "father", and distributed bit parts in a film supposedly directed by Poitier. "I never beat anyone over the head," Hampton said. "I was a perfect gentleman."

On several occasions, he tried to weasel his way into Andy Warhol's office, but Warhol saw through the spiel every time. "Andy was a con-artist himself," Hampton explained. "One salesman can always spot another."

He had more success with Osborn Elliot, the Dean of Columbia School of Journalism and former editor of Newsweek. Elliot took him in, only to throw him out one morning after discovering his "celebrity" guest in bed with another man.

When Elliot told his friend John Guare how he and his wife had been duped, Guare saw it as the basis for a play, and became further hooked on the idea after reading newspaper reports of Hampton's arrest (his seventh) in October 1983 and imprisonment for 22 months.

When Six Degrees of Separation opened on Broadway, the feared New York Times critic Frank Rich hailed it as "a masterwork that captures New York as Tom Wolfe did in Bonfire of the Vanities".

Hampton heard about the play while holidaying in Hawaii and immediately returned to give interviews to the press and to gatecrash the first-night party ("I know how to waltz into a room, darling"). He then hired the hot-shot celebrity lawyer Richard Golub and filed a $100 million civil suit against Guare, claiming that because the play made use of incidents in his life he was entitled to compensation and damages.

In the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the judge's reply to Hampton's argument that he was entitled to "the fruits of his labour" was that "society's response to one whose labours are in violation of its penal laws is punishment, not reward". Hampton appealed, without success, and declared, "I will go on and on". He later hounded Guare with death threats but was acquitted at his trial for harassment.

Thereafter he had a shot at acting and continued duping others for money. In 1991 he told the business manager of a theatre he was the actor who played David Hampton playing Sidney Poitier's son in Guare's play. When the victim summoned the police, Hampton's nonchalant response was to deny that he knew the complainant, and to suggest that he had been ripped off by someone impersonating Hampton the celebrated impersonator: "You know, I had this trouble before."

One of his last victims went on a date in 2001 with a man he knew as David Hampton-Montilio; he came back $1,400 poorer, but conceded that it was "one of the best dates that I ever went on".